Analysis, guides and market intelligence on buying, selling and catching UK domains and websites.
Public web archives keep the words and look of many old websites and almost none of the machinery behind them. An asset-by-asset guide, with original DropOps data on the archived homepages of 7,613 recently dropped, mostly well-linked .uk domains.
Buying a website means buying a domain, content, code, accounts, data and income, and each transfers differently. A UK checklist covering .uk domains, copyright, archive history, traffic and SEO evidence, customer data, VAT and the handover order.
We analysed 24,675 sales of expired .uk domain names at drop auction, reported by DomainLore between February 2009 and September 2026. The median was £102 and nearly half sold for £50–£99. The method, exclusions and limits are set out in full.
A practical UK guide to rebuilding a lost website from public web archives: finding and choosing captures, what will be missing and why, who owns the words and pictures, and how to keep the old addresses working.
An old or acquired domain gives you four honest options: restore the original, restore and modernise, repurpose, or start fresh. This article covers the rights, evidence and URL decisions each one needs, with a decision matrix and the lines none of them may cross.
What to check before you buy a .uk domain, where, and in what order: the registration record, the name's past life in public web archives, trade marks and company names, the DRS test, links, sale evidence and spam signals, with what each check can't tell you.
Building a new site on an expired domain is fine if it serves people first. Here is what Google's expired domain abuse policy says, the UK brand risks it does not cover, how to treat old URLs and backlinks honestly, and a checklist to run before launch.
Where a site's old addresses can be found once the site has gone, how messy those lists are, and how to turn them into a one-hop redirect map ranked by evidence, with a worked example and rules for Apache, nginx and _redirects.
A rebuild keeps its search visibility when every old address gets a deliberate decision, redirects go straight to the right page and the new site's signals agree. This guide covers live sites and sites that have already gone.
For developers and technical SEOs: how captures are made, how to query the Wayback CDX API, why an empty Availability API answer proves nothing, and a restoration pipeline from discovery to validation.
A .uk name can be renewed until 90 days after expiry and drops at 95. The lifecycle in force today, what changes on 9 February 2027, what Nominet's daily drop list does and doesn't tell you, and what 205,988 names reaching their drop time in 2026 show.
AI can turn an old website into a modern draft quickly. It cannot tell which of the old site's facts are still true. What it does well, where it goes wrong, what Google's guidance says, and how to review an AI-rebuilt draft before anything goes live.
